It is possible to make a decent movie from a comic book. Iron Man, Batman Begins and Dark Knight, and the first two Spiderman movies have proven as such. Even Sin City, for all its gore and plot issues, stood out stylistically as a worthy film. That said, as good as some comic-book movie franchises can be, it is way easier to make a horrible one.
I really wasn’t expecting much from this Punisher movie. I could barely sit through one of the trailers before wanting to scream and run away in terror (much like the movie’s victims, actually). I could only imagine how much more horrible an hour and forty-seven minutes of this could be.
Fortunately, The Punisher: War Zone is not as atrocious as its advertisements would make it out to be. It’s slightly better. But only slightly.
The Punisher: War Zone does have a few nice touches. In one scene, villains Jigsaw and Loony Bin Jim spend some time in front of an American flag backdrop, mimicking Uncle Sam’s attempts to recruit soldiers in a quest to recruit people to fight the Punisher. There are a few cute one-liners, including one moment where FBI agent Paul Budiansky tells a criminal that he’s under arrest, only to have the Punisher come up from behind and shoot the criminal in the face, provoking Budiansky’s “Would you stop doing that?” The production crew makes liberal use of the surround sound in the theater, causing little jumps and confused glances around the room when voices and missiles come up from behind and next to the audience. Otherwise, this film is a tiresome series of clichés and boring action sequences that really make audiences wish they had stayed home to watch Dark Knight for the thousandth time instead.
The recipe for a good comic book adaptation is to take the action sequences in stride, make them interesting, and make the characters involved in those action sequences worth caring about. Punisher does have an abundance of action sequences, but the characters are wooden, hackneyed, and hard to sympathize with. In the first scene, Punisher Frank Castle murders an entire family as they’re sitting down to eat dinner. True, this was a mob family, and a terribly one-dimensional, archetypal mob family at that, but were we really supposed to believe that every person in that room was a bad person? No matter how many flashback scenes The Punisher gives us, showing how his own family was murdered in cold blood by the mob, it still is nearly impossible to sympathize with him later. Ray Stevenson’s one-note acting doesn’t make it easier.
The movie is predictable to a fault. I found it very difficult to stay interested and pay attention, and while I wondered why and when the characters decided to go to whatever locations they were going to, I found it very easy to figure out what would happen when they got there. Worse still, the filmmakers chose to endanger a child as a desperate ploy for sympathy. The idea of putting a little girl in danger is a cheap trick on its own, but it would have worked a little better if her mother, played by Julie Benz, had been anything but annoying. Her acting clearly came from watching the female leads in movies like Cellular and attempting a watered down version.
At one point in the movie, Julie Benz turns to The Punisher to ask, “Who punishes you?” It’s a decent question, and one that pretty much remains unanswered. We don’t know who punishes the Punisher, but we do know who punishes the audience.
Grade: D
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